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Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

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Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#32

I collect a lot of certs for fun, but most have not been helpful. I still like to collect them anyway. I think OSCP was the most legitimately useful in tech https://www.offensive-security.com/pwk-oscp/ PMP has been useful to take on Project Manager roles, but really PrM roles aren't all that exciting to begin with. Still helps when you want to run your own projects. I'm currently studying to be a certified parliament…

Just curious, how are you going to get CPA? Don't you need work experience as well as exams for that?

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#33
I have maybe 2-3 quite old certs. I don’t really seek out certification, and I wouldn’t want to work for a company that requires them. Interview me and feel free to hand out a coding assignment and call my refs – if you still don’t believe in my competence, just don’t hire me.

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#34
post #29
post #24

Not sure if it's what you mean but graduating from a good uni seems to make a difference to people. I went to Cambridge and people always treat you a bit different when you say. Though it's more having gone than what you studied. Even if you are too late for undergrad you can always potentially do a masters at some high ranking place.

My experience is once you've got your foot in the door at a company nobody is interested in your university background. Perhaps it's different if you have a higher qualification like a doctorate.

Could be - I never really did the career thing.

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#35

Fair or not, if someone has flooded their email signature with certs, my expectations lower.

Same with the resumes. It's ok to have a section and list a few certificates, but quite regularly I see people put logos of some certificate programs on top of the resume, next to their name. It doesn't make a good impression.

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#36

Honestly I do not do certs to help my career. I find product / vendor based certification helps me round out my knowledge of a product better than just execution of a given task I need done at the time. This has helped me understand more of the capabilities of the what I wanted to learn IMO this is more were the value of certs come in. So for example I would not get a AWS Cert to get a Job in Cloud Administration, I…

Yeah. This. I don’t hire people based off AWS certs, but I encourage my people to get them for the learning. I’d say the general AWS knowledge I’ve gotten from even the most basic AWS certs have legitimately helped my career because now I know how the services fit together.

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#37

I collect a lot of certs for fun, but most have not been helpful. I still like to collect them anyway. I think OSCP was the most legitimately useful in tech https://www.offensive-security.com/pwk-oscp/ PMP has been useful to take on Project Manager roles, but really PrM roles aren't all that exciting to begin with. Still helps when you want to run your own projects. I'm currently studying to be a certified parliament…

How do you keep up with CPE requirements across all of the carts? Just the CPA cert alone requires a minimum of 40 hours per year.

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#39
Getting my EMT cert was pretty important for getting a job as an EMT. In all seriousness the difference between getting hired for my tech jobs vs as an EMT was interesting. I’m used to the standard multi week interview process, but for EMS the only question was if I had my certs.

Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?

#40
I got my CCIE and then went to work in software where no one gave a shit, but since then I've moved back to more networking-centric roles and it's definitely paying dividends. That said, Cisco ain't what they used to be and I don't think I'd encourage anyone to start their CCIE journey today.
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